Retiring music teacher Bigelow caps her career with a fitting coda

It is not a season of loss for longtime B.M.C. Durfee High School music teacher Jane Fiore Bigelow, who won't be going back to the classroom next fall.

Marc Munroe Dion Herald News Staff Reporter

FALL RIVER — It is not a season of loss for longtime B.M.C. Durfee High School music teacher Jane Fiore Bigelow, who won’t be going back to the classroom next fall.

Bigelow, 58, is retiring after 36 years of teaching, all of teaching music, most of it at Durfee.

“I started and I spent about three years at Talbot teaching music,” she said.

Right now, she’s not just facing retirement — she’s approaching a kidney transplant. The donor will be one of her former students.

“There was no one in my family who could do this,” she said.

“She’s young,” Bigelow said. “I think she’d be more comfortable remaining out of it now, to avoid the attention.”

For Bigelow, it’s a huge gift but one that seems to fit well in with nearly four decades at the same school, the high school she attended.

“I’ve seen generations of students,” she said.

But it’s not a season of loss.

“I always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” she says. “I mean, I knew when I was 14.”

It was a good decision.

“I loved it,” she says of her career.

As a music teacher working with Durfee’s theater students, Bigelow helped put on more shows than she can count, though she’s willing to admit it might be 100 or better.

“I often did three shows a year and sometimes more,” she said. “It could be in triple figures.”

“There were a couple of times when almost everyone on the City Council had been in one of my shows,” she said, adding that the School Committee often could say the same.

After learning Bigelow spent 36 years as a teacher, it’s natural to ask her if she liked the kids she taught.

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. I taught some very extraordinary people.

“When you teach music and theater, you’re dealing with kids who have chosen it,” she said.

Still, there are things Bigelow wants to do with the extra time.

“The first thing I’ll do is spend more time with my father,” she said.

Bigelow said her father, in his 90s now, lives just down the street and owns an impressive collection of Durfee High School memorabilia.

“There’s just so much tradition involved with Durfee,” Bigelow said. “For decades, it was almost a tradition for people to leave Fall River to go to college and come back to teach here.”

Along with her time as a teacher, Bigelow put on, or helped put on, musical theater all over the area.

“Bristol Community College, UMass Dartmouth, Little Theatre, the Providence Players,” she says, listing places where she’s been involved in live theatrical productions.

“Mostly, I did musical directing,” she said. “And I played piano.”

“In the 1970s, in Fall River, I did theater in the streets for CD-Rec,” she said.

“I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m not going to get up and go to this place I’ve gone to for 36 years,” she said.

Paul Coogan, vice principal at B.M.C. Durfee High School, has 30 years in the school system, 25 of them at Durfee.

“My first job at Durfee was in-school suspension,” Coogan. “It was in the music hall. That’s where I met her.”

Coogan said he’d been down to Bigelow’s classroom recently and stopped to count the awards on the wall.

“She’s been here 36 years and there are 36 plaques on the wall,” he said.

The awards come from all state theater competitions like The Boston Globe Awards.

“She would compete against schools that put a lot more money into theater than we do,” Coogan said. “Her kids would compete with places like Wellesley and Cambridge,” Coogan said.

There are people who’ll tell you that schools should teach reading, writing and arithmetic, that art and music are at best “frills.”

“I didn’t teach a frill,” Bigelow said. “I have taught life lessons. I don’t think there are frills. I think a comprehensive high school should teach everything.”

She said her students, a huge number of whom are still in touch with her, used their knowledge of acting to survive and prosper, using skills and confidence acquired in theater to ace job interviews and give corporate presentations.

“The theater helps you learn more about yourself,” she said. “If you find your place here, you’ll find your place out there.”

Betty Yokell, who taught band and later rose to be director of performing arts for the Fall River, said Bigelow was in high school when they met.